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Blight Affects School Performance

January 26, 2009, 9am PST

A new study in Britain makes the connection between blighted environments and poor school performance.

"To date, policy-makers and researchers have sought only to establish whether there is a link between pupils' behaviour and a school's building or interior. They have ignored the possible connection between behaviour and a school's wider physical environment, outside its grounds and as far as 10 minutes away. The closest examination was the government-backed Steer report on school discipline, in 2005, which admitted that "the surroundings in which we work and learn have a major impact on our behaviour".

Published today, exclusively in Education Guardian, is a study that, for the first time, seeks to establish whether there are links between a neighbourhood's physical decline and pupil behaviour, truancy, teacher morale and a school's ability to deliver exam results.

One More Broken Window: The Impact of the Physical Environment on Schools was written and researched by Perpetuity Group, a Leicester-based research and consultancy firm, for the Nasuwt teaching union."